Situation

CIMA is the world’s largest and leading professional body of management accountants.

As a progressive organization CIMA had been an early adopter of document imaging and document management technology.  Whilst this foresight had provided significant benefits for the organisation one of the document managements systems employed had become legacy and unsupported.  This presented a risk to CIMA as the system held both membership and financial data which needed to be retained for a significant period of time in order for CIMA to be compliant.

As a result of this situation CIMA identified a migration of data and capability to a new platform as a suitable way forward.  Microsoft SharePoint became a candidate given that CIMA already used the platform and its forward longevity as a supported Microsoft platform was key to mitigate the main risk associated with the legacy system.

Challenge

• Migration of documents and meta data from a legacy document management system source to Microsoft SharePoint destination.
• High volume of source documents.
• Different document types in the source.
• Different document profiles in the source.
• Minimal tolerance for data loss.
• Scanned images in the source stored in TIFF imaging format using a legacy compression algorithm.
• Source archive still being updated.

Solution

• Migration of data into Microsoft SharePoint.
• Enhancement of Microsoft SharePoint search capabilities to reproduce the capabilities of the source system.
• Integration of existing imaging (scanning) system to Microsoft SharePoint.
• Integration of existing imaging (scanning) system to Microsoft Dynamics (Great Plains).
• High performance, high volume migration process.
• Reconciliation of source and destination systems.
• Conversion of imaged (scanned) documents to Adobe PDF for long term data storage.
• Handling legacy TIFF.
• Managed migration, handling user’s requirements to update the archive.

Benefits

• Reduced platform and risk with migration to a supported platform.
• Reduced platform risk with improved solution documentation and handover to CIMA staff.
• Increased user efficiency with improved search process.
• Increased user efficiency with improved imaging process.
• Increased infrastructure efficiency by using existing Microsoft SharePoint infrastructure.
• Assisted CIMA in achieving compliance with a supported platform and image format.